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Hacksaw Ridge – An Extraordinary True Story

The compelling and brutally honest story of the first conscientious objector to win the medal of honor.

Desmond Doss was the only American soldier in WWII to fight on the front lines without a weapon in Okinawa during the bloodiest battle of WWII, where he saved 75 men without firing or carrying a gun as he believed that while the war was justified, killing was nevertheless wrong. As an army medic, he single-handedly evacuated the wounded from behind enemy lines, braved fire while tending to soldiers and was wounded by a grenade and hit by snipers. Doss was the first conscientious objector awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

”Desmond Doss was singular,” says director Mel Gibson. ”There are few, if any people, who could or would replicate his actions. The humility he maintained in discussing his heroics is a testament to the mettle of the man. In fact, Desmond was asked permission for years to adapt his story into a film, and repeatedly declined, insisting that the “real heroes” were the ones in the ground. In a cinematic landscape overrun with fictional “superheroes,” I thought it was time to celebrate a real one.

“Andrew Garfield truly inhabited the character and captured the essence of Desmond Doss,” says director Mel Gibson. The Golden Globe and Tony Award-nominated actor known for his roles as Peter Parker in The Amazing Spiderman and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, immediately jumped at the role. “There wasn’t any hesitation when I read the script” says Garfield. “I think it’s rare in this world to have someone like Desmond, who is so tuned into themselves, so tuned into what that still, small voice inside is saying, that no matter what is thrown at them, they know what they can do, and what they will not do.”

When the order came to retreat, one man stayed.

In the Spring of 1945 – as the war in the Pacific entered its final, most deadly days, and U.S. forces in Okinawa encountered some of the most ferocious fighting ever witnessed – a single soldier stood out from the rest. This was Desmond T. Doss, a conscientious objector, who despite vowing to never kill, served boldly as an unarmed medic in the infantry … and went on to single-handedly save the lives of dozens of his fallen fellow soldiers under lethal fire without firing a single bullet.

An unwavering Seventh Day Adventist, Doss was living in Virginia when he voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Army. He had no interest in fighting, but rather Doss wanted to serve as a “non-combatant” medic. It was not a path with which the military was familiar, but Doss persisted. Skinny, vegetarian and unwilling to train on Saturdays let alone carry a gun, Doss was initially ridiculed and abused by his compatriots – who, convinced he would be a dangerous liability in the foxholes with them, tried every which way they could to drive him out of the army. But Doss persisted all the way to Okinawa, where his unit was ordered to take part in the near-impossible capture of the massive Maeda Escarpment – aka Hacksaw Ridge. Atop this steep, looming 400-foot cliff lay heavily fortified machine-gun nests, booby traps and Japanese soldiers in caves who vowed to fight to the end.

It was there that Doss demonstrated that he was made not only of principle but also rare courage. Facing a desperate assault of heavy fire, Doss refused to seek cover. When his battalion was ordered to retreat, he alone remained behind and ran repeatedly into the kill zone, with nothing but his convictions, to drag to safety an estimated 75 badly injured men who were destined to die had he not intervened.

Doss would go on to receive the Medal of Honor from President Harry Truman in October of 1945, with a citation that drew attention to “outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions.” It was then that the journey to bring Doss’s story to the screen began. Those who heard what Doss had achieved and understood how unusual it was (there have since been only two other conscientious objectors awarded the Medal of Honor) immediately saw that that it was a potent and provocative story. But it would be another half century before it became a reality – in part because Doss chose to lead a quiet, humble life without the notoriety a film would bring.

Robert Schenkkan [Screenwriter] Pulitzer Prize, Tony, and WGA Award winner, two-time Emmy nominated writer. Author of fifteen plays: All the Way, The Great Society, Hanussen, Shadowplay, By the Waters of Babylon, Handler, A Single Shard, Devil and Daniel Webster, Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates, Final Passages, The Marriage of Miss Hollywood and King Neptune, Heaven on Earth, Tachinoki, The Dream Thief, and The Kentucky Cycle (Pulitzer prize, Tony and Drama Desk nominations). Also a collection of one-act plays, Conversations with the Spanish Lady, and a musical, (book and co-lyrics) The Twelve, winner of the 2015 Henry Award. The 2014 Broadway production of All The Way swept the Awards season winning the Drama Desk, Outer Critics, Drama League, and TONY@ Award as well as the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Award, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Award, and Boston’s Elliot Norton Award. It also set two box office records on Broadway. It aired in May, 2016 as a film for HBO, with Steven Spielberg producing, directed by Jay Roach, and has been nominated for eight Emmys including Best Drama. There are plans to bring the sequel, The Great Society, to NYC in fall, 2017. Film: Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson and starring Andrew Garfield, will be released on November 4, 2016. The Quiet American directed by Phillip Noyce. TV: The Pacific (HBO miniseries – WGA Award, two Emmy and Humanitas Award nominations), The Andromeda Strain, Crazy Horse, Spartacus. Currently, Robert is writing a movie about the Manhattan Project for Robert Redford and adapting the Dave Robicheaux novels as a series for television

But now with a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (Kentucky Cycle, All the Way) and Australian writer Andrew Knight (The Water Diviner), as well as a highly accomplished team led by Academy Award®-winning director Mel Gibson, Doss’s unsung story would at last be told as only 21st century filmmaking could. It would be not only a story of what men endured on Okinawa, but of the loved ones back home who shaped and bolstered Desmond Doss’s belief.

“Desmond never wanted to sell his life rights, he didn’t want to popularize himself, feeling that that would be a contradiction to who he was,” says producer Bill Mechanic. “It wasn’t until late in his life that people convinced him that it was time to tell the story so that it would live on.”

Doss passed away at the age of 87 in March 2006. Several years before that, filmmaker Terry Benedict had received his blessing to begin producing a documentary about Doss, “The Conscientious Objector,” and secured the life rights to his story. Feeling the time was also right to explore bringing Doss’s story to motion picture audiences as a multi-layered drama, Benedict approached producer David Permut.

Permut says “For the most part, Desmond has been a forgotten hero by the general public and I’m very proud that we had the opportunity to immortalize his legend in a film that presents a truly unique perspective of war, conviction and a man who stands by his beliefs at all costs.”

Permut approached Mechanic, who was thrilled to become involved in the film.

Mechanic says: “I always saw this story as being about a man who has very strong beliefs – which are then tested in an absolute hell that he comes out of even stronger.”

Mel Gibson Takes The Helm

Mel Gibson [Director] was born in upstate New York, but at age twelve, moved to Australia with his family. After high school, Mel attended the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Arts, where he was trained in classical British theatre tradition and appeared in a number of plays, including Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot. In 1979, Gibson caught the attention of director George Miller and was cast in Mad Max, the first film to bring him worldwide recognition. He then appeared in the title role of Tim, where Gibson’s portrayal of a handicapped young man earned him an Australian Film Institute (AFI) Best Actor Award. Gibson’s international fame grew with the two hit sequels to Mad Max–The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome as well as with Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, which brought Gibson a second AFI Best Actor Award. In 1982, Weir and Gibson collaborated again on The Year of Living Dangerously. In 1984, Gibson made his American film debut in The River, followed by The Bounty. He appeared in other films such as Mrs. Soffel, Blood Father , Tequila Sunrise, Bird on a Wire, Air America, but it was the record breaking and genre defining, Lethal Weapon (1, 2, 3, and 4) franchise that would cement his status in Hollywood. Following this success, Gibson founded Icon Productions, whose first film was Hamlet, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. In 1995, Gibson produced, directed and starred in the critical and box office success Braveheart, which was the recipient of five Academy Awards® including Best Picture and Best Director, after receiving a leading 10 nominations. The movie also garnered Gibson a Golden Globe Award® for Best Director, a Special Achievement in Filmmaking from the National Board of Review, the 1996 NATO/ShoWest Director of the Year and the Broadcast Film Critics Association award for Best Director. His other films include Ransom, Conspiracy Theory, Payback, The Patriot , What Women Want , We Were Soldiers, Signs, The Beaver and Edge of Darkness. He produced, co-wrote and directed The Passion of The Christ and Apocalypto. He produced, co-wrote and starred in Get the Gringo

In search of a screenwriter who could navigate all the historical, biographical and spiritual territory of Desmond Doss’s story, Bill Mechanic hired Robert Schenkkan—who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his Kentucky Cycle plays, an epic story of Western history and mythology told through the intersecting stories of three Kentucky families. In 2014, Shenkkan won the Outstanding Play Tony Award for All The Way, as well as numerous other awards, for its mesmerizing take on President Lyndon Johnson’s first year in office, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. Schenkkan’s passion for humanizing large historical events seemed a unique match with the material.

It was certainly not a story that lent itself to a conventional structure – combining seemingly disparate elements of romance, family struggles, probing of faith and the brutal realities of war. But by utilizing Doss’s own verbal accounts of what happened, and accounts from Army records, Mechanic and Schenkkan honed in on exploring how Doss’s steadfast belief that it was wrong to kill, even in a war he believed was just, emerged.

Mechanic explains: “We both felt you have to understand where Desmond comes from to understand the decisions he makes. We discussed at one point starting in Okinawa, but it was just too important to explain the impact of Doss’s parents, of his meeting his wife Dorothy, and the formation of his rudimentary belief system as a young man.”

Schenkkan played with some of the early chronology to craft a tight structure. He carved secondary characters from amalgams of real people, and streamlined events from Doss’s early life. But when it came to Doss’s incredible feats on Hacksaw Ridge, the screenplay hewed as close to the factual record as possible. That meant the film needed a director who could both expose the intimate inner life of the Doss family and also re-create the epic combat in Okinawa with a mesmerizing realism.

That specific combination is why Mechanic began doggedly pursuing Mel Gibson. With films that span from the classic, Academy Award Best Picture-winning Braveheart to The Patriot, WeWereSoldiers, The PassionoftheChrist and his most recently directed film, the Mayan civilization epic Apocalypto, Gibson has become known for meshing big themes with atmospheric style that takes audiences into revealing worlds. Mechanic had previously worked with Gibson on Braveheart and has watched as Gibson has continued to expand creatively.

“I first sent Mel the script for Hacksaw Ridge in 2002, and in 2010, and then again in 2014,” recalls Mechanic. “His people had read it earlier, but up until the third time I sent it, Mel had been more interested in directing projects that he’d developed himself. In 2014, he read it overnight and by the morning he was essentially in.”

For Mechanic, Gibson was always the ultimate choice. “Hacksaw Ridge felt to me almost like a companion piece to Braveheart,” comments the producer. “It pulls together the same themes of faith, violence and war, though it’s a very different story about a man from a very different time and background. To me, what also sets Mel apart as a contemporary filmmaker is how experiential his filmmaking is, how visceral the storytelling is in his films. He’s become a consummate director. He’s equally great with characters, with actors, with the camera and the editing process and with giving audiences a new experience.”

Gibson saw in Hacksaw Ridge a chance to bring into the light a forgotten hero – and he was drawn to Desmond Doss as man who determined to find a way to live by the values that meant everything to him, even when they seemed in conflict with the whole world around him.

Says Gibson: “Desmond Doss abhorred violence, it was against his principles, his religious beliefs, but he wanted to serve his country in World War II as a medic. How does somebody go into the worst place on earth without a weapon? It was all the more compelling to me, because it was a true story, and I thought I could bring my visual language to it.”

Gibson notes that Doss never called himself a conscientious objector. That was the army’s term. Instead, he called himself a “conscientious co-operator,” believing with unflagging tenacity that he had plenty to contribute without having to kill other human beings.

“He was a co-operator in the sense that he passionately wanted to join the war effort, but he wanted to enter it as someone aiming not to take life but to save it,” says Gibson. “Still, you have to ask, what kind of madman goes into that kind of a conflagration seen on Okinawa without being armed? Doss defied what anyone could have expected from that situation. Somebody mentioned to me that the Congressional Medal of Honor is usually given to people who have a singular moment where they make a snap decision and do one heroic thing. One of the things that stood out to me about Desmond is that in Okinawa, this guy was heroic 24/7, for a whole month. He took heroism to another level not often seen.”

Andrew Knight [Screenwriter] is probably Australia’s most successful writer/producers. His career spans more than thirty years and he has written across a wide range of genres: having had top rating hits in everything from comedy to high drama, mini-series and series television to features. He is viewed as instrumental in the creation and success of some of the late 80’s and 90’s biggest comedy hits. In 1989 he formed Artist Services Pty Ltd with Steve Vizard and it became one of Australia’s most successful production companies.In the early 90’s he moved back into drama and again succeeded in creating, writing and producing some of the most memorable film and television in the country. Some of his career highlights include Rake (now entering its fifth series), Jack Irish (3 telemovies and now a six part series and writing another), SeaChange – the most successful, landmark series of its time, The Broken Shore, After the Deluge, My Brother Jack, Kangaroo Palace, Tripping Over, The Fast Lane and feature films Spotswood, Siam Sunset, and the recent box office hit and Australian film of the year, The Water Diviner directed and starring Russell Crowe. He currently has his co-written features, Ali’s Wedding and Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge both due for release in November. He has three other films earmarked for production next year including King Of Thieves, The Cartographer and ‘Rides Like a Girl’.

“Once Gibson came aboard, he and I brought on Andrew Knight (The Water Diviner) to help build upon the incredible screenplay that Schenkkan had written several years earlier,” says Mechanic.

Gibson looked to weight the balance between the home-front – where Desmond became the man he was – and the battlefield – where Desmond had to put his beliefs into action amid utter frenzy. “The first part of the film is a story of Desmond coming to grips with the difficult relationship with his father and his father’s demons, and of finding his true love, who keeps him thinking of home,” says the director.

Mechanic notes that when it came to the battle sequences, Gibson zeroed right in on the most essential and creative details. “Mel has such an eye for war action, I feel he was the real creator of all the battle sequences, regardless of who wrote the scenes,” says the producer.

Yet even in the most frenetic action, Gibson wanted the humanity of the character to hold sway. He says of the battle sequences: “The important part was to give you the sense that this is the worst place anyone has ever seen, which it was for these men. And here’s Desmond, this guy you’ve hopefully come to know and to love, thrown into this terrible place where he will finally see how measures up to the standards he has set for himself.”

Andrew Garfield As Desmond Doss

Finding the actor who could encapsulate the distinctive man who was Desmond Doss – humble, comedically romantic, peaceful yet full of unexpected depths of bravery — would be key.

Bill Mechanic explains: “It was 14 years for me making the film, so I looked at many actors over that time to play Desmond Doss. He’s a difficult character to portray because he’s so inward, he’s not going to explain himself a lot of times in the movie, so it had to be somebody who could inhabit his persona so fully that you could see who he was.”

Mechanic knew that physicality was not the heart of the role, although it would take the lead actor into searing action. “Even if he was a Superman with a body built like The Rock, you still wouldn’t believe that a person still could do what Desmond did,” the producer muses. “It would take something else to believe in Desmond and that’s what Andrew Garfield brought.”

The Golden Globe and Tony Award-nominated actor known for his roles as Peter Parker in The Amazing Spiderman and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, immediately jumped at the role.

“There wasn’t any hesitation when I read the script” says Garfield. “I think it’s rare in this world to have someone like Desmond, who is so tuned into themselves, so tuned into what that still, small voice inside is saying, that no matter what is thrown at them, they know what they can do, and what they will not do.”

Doss’s rare respect for the enemy and the sanctity of all human life also awed Garfield, who says it gave him pause. “Desmond treated the enemy with as much care as he would treat his fellow Americans. That’s hard to wrap your mind around, but I wanted to try to understand it more, and to learn from his perspective on life and on the world — this beautiful perspective he had that we’re all one. Even though I believe this is a story that transcends any specific religion, it’s a very spiritual story,” says Garfield.

Despite the fact that Doss is now deceased, Garfield says he felt a heavy responsibility to honor his life and achievements. He spent three months prior to production devoted solely to exploring Doss and his surroundings in depth.

“The preparation was extensive,” Garfield comments. “I visited Desmond’s hometown, the place where he retired, the home he grew up in and the home where he passed away. I walked the walks that he walked. I read all the books about him, absorbing as much as I possibly could. But that was just scratching the surface, really. One of the joys of doing a story like this is attempting to dive into someone else’s being, the time in which they were alive, which is endlessly fascinating. You get to be an historian and a researcher.”

Mel Gibson was gratified to see Garfield cut to the heart of the character he so wanted audiences to get to know. “Andrew is an amazing actor. He’s not your typical looking action hero but he has those qualities inside him,” Gibson observes. “He’s a guy who, like Desmond Doss, has real convictions and so he was able to portray Desmond in a real and moving way. The film is so focused on his character, he really had to be our quarterback and he was.”

Garfield was equally exhilarated by the working rapport with Gibson. “Working with Mel as a director has been a real highlight of my time being an actor so far,” he says. “Mel tells a story in such a beautiful, compelling way. He’s a bit like Desmond Doss in that he’s got this real innocence and purity to him. With Mel, everything is on the surface, and you know exactly what he’s feeling at all times, even if he doesn’t want you to know he can’t help himself. He’s sincere and passionate, and it’s infectious.”

The Three Worlds Of Hacksaw Ridge

Hacksaw Ridge takes place in three starkly contrasting worlds: small-town Lynchburg, Virginia where Desmond grows up and develops his resolute philosophies of life; the WWII-era barracks where Desmond proves his unrelenting determination to serve as a “conscientious co-operator”; and the frenzy on the cliff-like terrain of Hacksaw Ridge itself.

To create all this, Mel Gibson assembled a crack team of craftspeople including director of photography Simon Duggan (The Great Gatsby, 300: Rise of an Empire, I, Robot); production designer Barry Robison (X-Men Origins: Wolverine); Oscar-winning costume designer Lizzy Gardiner (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert); and Oscar-nominated editor John Gilbert (The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring).

Production took place entirely in Australia, which was able both to simulate 1930s Virginia and the scrubby, harsh terrain of Hacksaw Ridge itself. Gibson says working there brought many advantages. “The level of the performers and the crew are excellent, as good or better than anywhere in the world. It’s a great place to shoot and I think it will remain so.”

Much of the challenging task of bringing Okinawa’s demolished surroundings to life fell to special effects supervisor Chris Godfrey and his team. Godfrey explains what was required: “Okinawa was the last stand before the Allies reached Japan, so the Americans had been bombing it for weeks. Germany was already out of the war, so all resources were focused around Okinawa. The ridge was devastated in all directions, so that’s where we came into play, trying to show the different scales to the devastation, from a ruined farmhouse surrounded by greenery to broken tanks.”

The crew worked with closely with a bevy of experts, including a WWII battleship expert, who sourced reference footage, mapped out how the ships would have attacked, the size of the weaponry they deployed and the size of the explosions themselves. Godfrey says: “There are a lot of wonderful experts who know the fine minutiae of World War II and we relied on that knowledge.”

The Hacksaw Ridge set was especially transporting for the cast. “It took your breath away,” recalls actor Luke Bracey. “When they drove us up to the set to shoot the first scene, it was really confronting. There was a nice grassy hill and then a little bit of red clay, but beyond that it was just desolate, an absolute wasteland, full of crater holes, and shell holes, and burnt trees — we got this jarring image of a landscape that’s been completely torn apart, and we understood a little bit of what those soldiers must have felt.”

That was the reality Desmond Doss faced – a reality of harrowing war but one to which he carried his own ironclad belief in the power of cultivating peace. Sums up Mel Gibson: “How do you pay tribute to a man like Desmond Doss? I think the best you can do is try to make a story that feels true. Desmond went way beyond what most of us could do, and he was exceptional, but it’s a reminder of how we all can try to measure up against that.”